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Left-wing politics are making a comeback in the United Kingdom, which is of more than academic interest since the swing of Britain’s political pendulum can foreshadow changes in the U.S. It was the radical 1975 election of Margaret Thatcher as head of the Tory party that predicted Ronald Reagan’s rise to power.

The new leader of Britain’s Labour Party, the hard-left Jeremy ­Corbyn, wants to renationalize the railways; increase the top marginal tax rate to 50% for incomes above 150,000 pounds ($230,000), among other new taxes; and ban nuclear weapons. The British ­media have written Corbyn off as unelectable, but they might be missing the point.

Even if Corbyn loses the general election, his very ­existence pulls the political center hard to the left. It was Labour’s last defeated leader, Ed Miliband, who proposed a “mansion tax” on properties worth more than £2 million, but it was Prime Minister David Cameron’s “conservative” government that, in late 2014, co-opted the policy and increased the stamp tax to 12% for properties above £1.5 million—and sent prime London house prices falling after five consecutive years of ­increases. A serious tax-the-rich ethos is afloat in Britain again.

The Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly recently opened a major retrospective of the Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei. One work eerily crawls with twitching porcelain crabs. The Chinese word for crab, he xie, is also a homonym for “harmonious” and much spouted by Communist apparatchiks. Weiwei knows what he’s doing. “There’s not much harmony here among the crustaceans,” notes the Guardian’s critic Adrian Searle. “The word is also used a lot on the Internet in China, as slang for censorship.” The Times of London says, “This is an exhibition that reveals art’s greatest potential.” Booking tickets in advance is a must.

Photo: LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images

He Xie, a heap of twitching porcelain crabs by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art

The Royal Academy sure knows how to curate a show. I saw its low-key exhibit of Joseph Cornell, an American textile salesman and artist who lived with his mother and brother in Queens. The recluse never once ventured outside of the U.S., and yet, in his basement, ­custom-built glass-fronted boxes filled with cutout magazine ­images and trinkets, creating vivid grand tours and other stunningly imaginative worlds in miniature.

A hugely valuable lesson sits in those little boxes. Cornell created a fantastic world out of butterfly wings, copper wire, and a medicinal-blue liquid in Pharmacy (1943), a work that foreshadows the British artist Damien Hirst by a half-century. Same thing goes for Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery (1943), a glass box stuffed with cutouts of parrots mounted on branches to create a three-dimensional assemblage of bric-a-brac that paved the way for Robert Rauschenberg. ­Salvador Dali considered Cornell the only true U.S. surrealist, with good reason.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that creativity comes from limitless freedom, but Cornell’s soaring boxes, dreamed up in his Queens basement, remind us how wrong that premise is. The imagination kicks in when the human spirit needs to soar past confining borders and limits, and the show instantly made me recall WPP CEO Martin Sorrell, who once told me he gives his senior executives “corridors of freedom.” The lesson here: Hand your staff tight budgets and clear limits—and then tell them to use their imaginations to soar past those very restrictions.

My new favorite Indian eatery in London is Dishoom above King’s Cross; no reservations allowed for parties under six people. In the insanely long line outside, you are handed glasses of the house chai before getting sent down to the brick-walled bar. Once there, we quaffed Bombay Martinis, the classic tipple deliciously spiced with cardamom and sandalwood. Count on a 90-minute wait for a table. Normally, I wouldn’t tolerate such nonsense, but Dishoom’s superb management somehow makes the delay charming, and the mouth-­watering dal and char-grilled marinated lamb chops were worth the wait. It is also reasonably priced at £139 for three.

Hakkasan, meanwhile, is a Michelin-starred Chinese restaurant found in a cavernous basement on Hanway Place. The cocktails named Rhubarb Margarita and Floating Goddess were sickly sweet, and the so-so dinner of tofu claypot and spicy prawns came in at £228 for three. But one dish was exceptional: roast duck served with ­slivers of black truffle and a sauce made of the finest white-truffle oil.

If none of these eateries excite, then head to my perennial favorites: Great Queen Street (old-English country fare, updated) and Al Hamra (classic Lebanese). Al Hamra’s grilled quail alone will ­reaffirm the joy of being alive.

After hunting for quail in southern Georgia, we asked Chef Peter Dale at the National in Athens, Ga., to prepare our birds and share with our audience his recipe for grilled quail with green garlic. “With wild game,” he says, “it is important to pair ingredients that are not only complimentary but also acknowledge the animals’ terrain.”

Most of us can convincingly fake a restaurant’s wine menu, but walk into a Japanese restaurant and peruse the sake menu, a Zen study in minimalism, and most of us are totally lost. Fret no longer. Abby Shultz, our colleague running Barron’s Asia Penta, has written an illuminating cheat sheet that is easy to follow and filled with wise suggestions about how you can develop your sake palate and find ideal pairings.

Taking the family to London this summer? There is a once-in-a-lifetime exhibit to see called “Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art” at the British Museum. Even if you are on a short and harried business trip to London, duck out of your meetings for half an hour and treat yourself to a brief visit. It will renew you – and make you want to go to the gym.

I don’t say this lightly. My daughter works in the British Museum’s press office, so I have long given her finger-wagging lectures on how she can’t pitch me on the British Museum’s exhibits – for conflicts-of-interest reasons. But when my wife and I showed up at the museum on a Friday evening, to pick up our daughter after work, she took us through the Defining Beauty exhibit that will be running until July 5th. Not bringing this extraordinary exhibit to the attention of Penta’s readers, due to some purist journalistic ideal, suddenly seemed far the worse crime.

We entered the exhibit’s darkened first room – and my jaw dropped. There were three statutes in the confined space: Straight ahead, crouching, was Aphrodite, the goddess of love, her rounded alabaster buttocks the definition of soft, feminine sensuality, her head turning to glance at me over her right shoulder, with just a few fingers of her right hand emerging over her left shoulder, like she was personally beckoning me to come around to take a peek at her body. If you do, as I did, beware. She is divine and when you circle around to get a frontal look, her dangerously hard stare won’t let you easily forget her exalted state.

Whether you are looking to entertain family or business relations from out of town, jazz supper clubs are a relaxing way to spend an evening. Jazz drummer Art Blakey once said, “Jazz washes away the dust of everyday life.” So true. Once the band is in a groove and your feet start tapping, the stress of work seems to melt away and become a distant memory. Here are three great-value New York jazz-and-supper clubs—a venue for formal ­entertaining, a laid-back barbecue joint, and an intimate uptown lounge.

What are some of the best-value wines on the market? That’s what we asked Daniel Johnnes, both a wine director for Daniel Boulud’s Dinex Group and a successful importer of wines.

Last time we visited Johnnes in his downtown digs, we asked the oenophile to identify the truly special wines he would serve his nearest and dearest over Christmas. (See “Three Magical Wines for the Holidays,” Penta, Dec. 9, 2013.)

Wall Street’s well-paid wine junkies didn’t bat an eye at his list, but some Penta readers—and a few colleagues—wagged their finger at us for soliciting what Johnnes calls “once in a lifetime” wines and vintages.

To experience the essence of Switzerland, forget Interlaken and Geneva, and head instead to Central Switzerland, to the lakeside village of Weggis in Canton Luzern.

In 1897, Samuel Clemens, otherwise known as Mark Twain, was experiencing financial difficulties and in mourning; his daughter had just died of spinal meningitis, at aged 24, in the Clemens’s home back in Connecticut. But forced by financial pressures to go on a speaking tour to London, Twain, his wife, and two surviving daughters eventually retreated to Weggis in Switzerland, a village found halfway down the Lake of Lucerne. Seeking a low-cost place to regroup and mourn their loss, Twain stayed 10 weeks in a simple guesthouse, with his family, while he worked on his book, Following the Equator.

“I believe this place [Weggis] is the loveliest in the world, and the most satisfactory. The scenery is beyond comparison beautiful,” he wrote in a letter that year. But he also noted, in his droll way, “Sunday in heaven is noisy compared to this quietness.”

We went to Genoa, Italy, in search of fish. We found fish in The Acquarium, but we more interested in the kind of pesce that ends up on a Genoese plate. It is not for nothing that 12th Century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa demanded “sea dates”, a now protected type of mussel that grows on the underwater belly of the region’s cliffs.

We arrived in the bustling Ligurian port just as the Slow Fish Biennial, a trade fair devoted to eating sustainable fish, was getting under way. Many of Genoa’s interesting local restaurants go unexplored by outsiders; exhausted travelers don’t have the energy to stray far from their hotels where they usually find expensive but forgettable dinners.

That’s because the city is built on the hills and Apennine mountains that surround the harbor. Buildings are jammed together on raked slopes, providing the intrepid tourist with haunting rooftop views, bathed in golden Mediterranean light. But climbing the stairs to catch the view is sometimes brutal, and scaling the steps inside the medieval city gates had us gripping the rail for dear life.

The passageways known as vicos are often just eight feet wide, prone to sudden twists, easy for a cigarette-smoking Vespa-riding demon to dispatch you to the hereafter with no-one the wiser. Henry James called the city’s Genoa’s streets “the crookedest and most incoherent” in the world.

But that is the heart of Genoa. You never know what is around the corner. It could be a medieval tower, a heavenly chocolate mousse, or a puppet show. Or a delicious platter of freshly caught and cooked fish.

How do you profitably invest in the veggie farms, grass-fed beef producers and artisan goat cheese-makers that make up the burgeoning local food system? When Woody Tasch, in 2008, published Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Food: Investing as if Food, Farms and Fertility Mattered, and launched the nonprofit Slow Money to help guide the flow of capital into small and local food enterprises, he did not have a clue. But he captured the zeitgeist.

Five years later, 650 farmers, ranchers, local food entrepreneurs, food activists and investors met at the fourth Slow Money Gathering in Boulder in late April, trying to better understand the economics of financially viable local farms. As Penta reported in its December cover story, “The New Philanthropists,” figuring out how to profitably integrate local, bio-diverse farms into food delivery chains is consuming many fine minds, including Microsoft millionaire, Narendra Varma; it’s wise to be aware of what is going on in this corner of the food and agricutlural industries.

Michael Brownlee, co-founder of Localization Partners, LLC, a Slow Money affiliate based in Boulder, said at the conference the food localization effort in Colorado is no longer about a “preferential lifestyle,” but rather about an economic development strategy for an agricultural state. Sounds a bit grand, but Denver’s Mayor Michael Hancock recently announced the city has an official food localization goal of 20% by 2020. Brownlee says Slow Money will be a key part of Denver’s strategy.

When my son Danny and I headed off for a five-day, food-themed vacation in Paris, we each had something in mind. Danny is a 22-year-old aspiring chef and wanted to scope out the latest happenings on the French culinary scene. I am a middle-aged food rube and hoped to refine my palette beyond turkey burgers and scrambled eggs. At the Pierre Gagnaire restaurant, a short walk from the Arc de Triomph, we both found what we were looking for, and then some.

Chef Pierre Gagnaire is a hero to the world’s most adventurous eaters. He mixes and matches flavors, textures and colors from various cooking traditions to create entirely original dishes. Each meal consists of extraordinary variety—mine came in 19 separate dishes—and Gagnaire constantly refreshes the menu, surprising even his regulars. These experiments in “fusion” cuisine have earned him three stars from Michelin and serious admiration from other top chefs. As a trusted Parisian source of Penta put it, the restaurant is “definitely the most fascinating gastronomic experience at the moment in Paris.”

This wasn’t hash browns at my New York diner. It was potatoes from Noirmoutier, an island off France’s Atlantic coast whose soil is rich in sea salt. Fertilized with seaweed, they are considered the best, most expensive potatoes known to man—the Rolls Royce of Potatoes. Paired with white asparagus, potatoes from Noirmoutier arrived at the table as one of our many appetizers, along with such imponderables as “fennel water flavored with tarragon” and “Aspic of anglerfish spiced with tandoori.”

At one point early on, our highly attentive waiter swooped in with a basket of bread. As you might suspect, it was not just any bread. It was insanely good and Danny, who had been working at an excellent bakery in upstate New York, Mrs. London’s of Saratoga Springs, knew exactly why. The baguettes, for instance, were made with “a darker wheat flower than you usually see in baguettes,” he told me. The “delicate, almost nutty” flavor of the flour permeated the bread. To Danny’s clear satisfaction as a baker, the bread, with its accompanying French butter, was “treated as its own course rather than a mere afterthought.”

About Penta

Written with Barron’s wit and often contrarian perspective, Penta provides the affluent with advice on how to navigate the world of wealth management, how to make savvy acquisitions ranging from vintage watches to second homes, and how to smartly manage family dynamics.

Richard C. Morais, Penta’s editor, was Forbes magazine’s longest serving foreign correspondent, has won multiple Business Journalist Of The Year Awards, and is the author of two novels: The Hundred-Foot Journey and Buddhaland, Brooklyn. Sonia Talati is Penta’s reporter about town, both online and for the magazine. She previously worked for the Wall Street Journal and various television station affiliates around the country. Sonia has a B.A. in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an M.A. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.